Minot, North Dakota camping

If you take a look at this photo you'll get an idea of our set-up.  Sometimes we didn't put up our camp kitchen, so the picnic table, whatever it's condition, served as counter, stove, dining room table, storage, sink, etc.  We used that old gold carry-on bag to store the stove when we packed things in the car.  We did have a water jug along.  One of those invaluable blue Rubbermaid tubs that traveled all over the country with us served as our dish bin.  A couple 'green' grocery bags were pantry, snack bag, cord and flashlight bags.  Our really nice white and blue tablecloth that Wingerts gave us worked well for the whole time.  I have to tweak the tools for the Alaska trip but it really worked pretty well.  Look at the RVs above my head and you'll get an idea of how far down the slope we were.

Those RVs, the parking lot for our car, the garage below are near to the height of the shed lower down.  We couldn't park near our campsite.  Of course, as 'old people' traveling with a tent, we had a lot of stuff to unload.  I was tired, of course, and not much help.  And, of course, my protector sweet-talked the camp host into letting us drive the car across the grass just for ten minutes so we could unload.  Two guys sharing a tent a bit away from ours sat on their picnic table and openly gawked at how much stuff we pulled out of our car.  I told them I charged a buck for admission to the show.  Well, I guess it does look like a pile when you pull out two blue clothes tubs, one for dishes, three 'green' bags, a tent, two sleeping bags, pump up two air mattresses, a water jug, a stove, a port-a-potti, reading material, a cooler, and who knows what all else.

As you can see from these few photos, the scenery in the tenting area was very pleasant, placid, pretty...You'd never guess that it had been the scene of a lot of violence just a year before.

The calm, lazy river you can see in the background flooded this campground.  You can see on the shed in the following photo, the watermark from the 2011 flood.  That shed was at approximately the height of the RVs in the first picture.  Water had been as high as the main office in the central part of the campground.  In fact, we saw evidence in other parts of the city that the flood had left extensive damage still being repaired.  We had intended to stay in a free/cheap city campground I found on the internet.  When we found it we realized that, not only was camping there unsafe because of the neighborhood, but it looked pretty abandoned with plenty of high-water marks on the trees in the park.

In the afternoon the next day we had a call unlike any we ever had over 45 years of camping.  It was from someone in the office of this campground.  Although we had only reserved and paid for one night, they wanted to know if we were staying another.  They had an unaccounted-for tent there.  We, however, were almost to our next destination in Medora.